“I am a Rorschach test,” Hillary Clinton told Esquire magazine in 1993. The label stuck — everything from her campaign to her “no-makeup face” has been described similarly.
She’s not the only one. President Trump and Sen. Bernie Sanders have also been called Rorschach tests. Barack Obama called himself a “human Rorschach test” during his 2008 presidential campaign. Add Brexit, Microsoft’s $26.2 billion acquisition of LinkedIn, and the film adaptation of Philip Roth’s novel “American Pastoral” to the list. Two weeks ago ESPN called Tom Brady “a Rorschach test in shoulder pads.” But what is a Rorschach test, exactly?
Writer and translator Damion Searls has the answer for us in his rich and engaging new book, “The Inkblots: Hermann Rorschach, His Iconic Test, and the Power of Seeing,” which dives into the history of the test — knowledge that may help us stop mangling our Rorschach metaphors.
Chances are you have encountered the 10 inkblots, carefully designed images that have remained the same since their introduction in 1921. They are open-ended responses admissible in court and used by therapists, teachers and job interviewers, despite heated controversy about their legitimacy.
So how did these ink stains earn our trust and so deeply enter into the American psyche?
It all starts with a hunky Swiss psychiatrist named Hermann Rorschach. Born in 1884, he expressed an interest in the arts from a young age (his childhood nickname was “Klex,” a German word for “inkblot”). His passion for art continued during training as a psychiatrist at the University of Zurich, where he learned from Carl Jung and Eugen Bleuler. From Bleuler he learned compassion for his patients, and from Jung he discovered the importance of open-ended questions to access the unconscious mind.
It was a time when everything seemed to change overnight with the arrival of Sigmund Freud. Before Freud, psychiatry’s methods “largely coincided with religious teachings about virtue, sin, character and self-restraint,” writes Searls. “Psychiatrists tried to cure cases of demonic possession.”
‘What had started as an experiment looked to be in fact a test.’
Rorschach came of age as a doctor during an “orgy of testing” at the university, where psychiatrists spent hours “stop-watching, dream-interpreting and psychoanalyzing their patients.”
His notes from then are filled with sketches of patients and charcoal drawings. One drawing of an onion dome with smoke rising from nearby smokestacks was marked up with Rorschach’s note: “A cookie? A mountain? A cloud?” His interest in the art movement Futurism sparked further interest into “how closely psychological explorations could be tied to art,” writes Searls.
It seems inevitable that inkblots would follow. Other clinicians had employed “blotograms” to measure imagination, especially in children. But no one had yet standardized these tests or scored them.
Rorschach started showing his own blots, drawn with fountain pen on white paper, to his patients at Munsterlingen Clinic in Switzerland. “The images hovered between meaninglessness and meaning, right on the borderline between all too obvious and not obvious enough,” writes Searls.
“People’s answers started to reveal more than Rorschach had thought possible: higher or lower intelligence, character and personality, thought disorders and other psychological problems,” Searls writes. “What had started as an experiment looked to be in fact a test.”
For it to be a test, he had to standardize his blots. His final versions weren’t just ink but also made of painted brushstrokes and were horizontally or bilaterally symmetrical. Size mattered. They had to be about 9.5 to 6.5 inches — the surrounding white space was as important as the image itself. He added dashes of red to “confront the test taker more aggressively.”
He wanted to create a conversation rather than an examination. He left room for multiple answers and allowed test takers to address the blots in whatever order they wished.
“What mattered was how people saw what they saw — how they took in information and how they understood it, interpreted it, felt about it. What they could do with it. How it sent them dreaming,” writes Searls.
Rorschach pinpointed four important aspects to score a person’s response. He noted if the test taker skipped any cards (this was outright abnormal) and then took into account the shape and detail incorporated into the responses, called a “form response.” Whether or not movement or color was included was also important.
For example, the greater amount of movement a person saw in the cards — seeing two bears kissing is a “movement response” — corresponded to the greater psychic inner life of an introvert. “Color responses” were linked to increased emotional expression and extroversion.
Though most saw butterflies and bats thanks to the cards’ symmetry, the wide range of answers were astounding. Take Card VIII for example: one saw “two polar bears” (coded as a form response); another “the flames of purgatory and two devils coming out” (a movement and “detail response”); another “a carpet” (a “poor” form response); and one very sick patient saw “the resurrection of the colossal … red and brownish and blue head veins tumors,” which was coded as a color response with “needless to say, other issues.”
Searls provides rare insight into Rorschach’s scoring methods (scoring is still considered a trade secret, even though it has changed dramatically since Rorschach’s time).
In Card III, one of Rorschach’s patients saw two men with top hats bowing to each other — a very typical response — but added: “It is as though that red thing in the middle were a power separating the two sides, preventing them from meeting.”
Rorschach saw multitudes in this answer: “The patient typically nags at himself, dissatisfied with his accomplishments; he is easily thrown off balance, but then recovers, because of his need to apply himself,” he wrote.
“His dominant mood, his habitual underlying affect, is rather anxious, depressed, and passively resigned, though all this can be and is controlled wherever possible, due to his good intellectual capacity and adaptability.”
The cards debuted in 1921 in a 174-page monograph titled “Psychodiagnostics.” A year after his namesake blot test entered the world, Rorschach died of appendicitis at age 37. Typically when a book’s hero dies, the story suffers. Not so with “Inkblots.” After Rorschach’s death the test took on a life of its own as a global, but distinctly American, phenomenon.
“Psychodiagnostics” spread like a fever, especially when it was translated into English and brought to America. This was the height of the perceived power of the Rorschach, described as “mental X-rays.”
A million people a year took the test as it climbed the ranks to the second-most-popular psychological exam in our country. Hospitals, clinics and schools began using the test.
The Rorschach test seemed unassailable. It was used in forensic settings, evaluating patients in custody disputes, personal-injury lawsuits and competency to stand trial. Psychiatrists used them to study Nazi war criminals during the Nuremberg trials. The Rorschach provided a window into the mind that no other test — especially in the days before the invention of brain imaging — seemed to.
The test also tapped into the “evolving sense of self” and the newfound creativity of the individual that so defined the US.
What better test to represent American individuality than with the Rorschach?
By the 1940s, the Rorschach had left the psych world and entered the popular imagination. Hollywood embraced it in movies like “The Dark Mirror,” a noir story of an evil twin who is revealed by her answers to a Rorschach test. The good twin sees “two people in costume, and they’re dancing around a maypole” and the bad twin sees “a mask.”
Advertising adapted the blots to commodify this newfound American individuality selling everything from money investment services to clothing. A 1950s perfume ad printed these words on top of a Rorschach-inspired image: “You are what you want to be with Bal de Tate, the ultimate complement to your personality.”
This still goes on to this day. There’s a $300 Rorschach-print swimsuit available to buy online right now. A few years ago, Bergdorf Goodman used the inkblots in their Fifth Avenue window display to sell expensive designer clothing. Rapper Jay Z even used Andy Warhol’s Rorschach on the cover of his 2011 memoir, “Decoded.”
But, as the study grew in popularity, the backlash hit hard. Researchers studied the efficacy of the blots finding that they were worse at predicting job performance or academic success than report cards or even a short questionnaire. Studies showed psychologists were more likely to over-diagnose mental problems when using the Rorschach. Another revealed that psychiatrists did hardly better than a coin toss in comparing top-ranking cadets to deeply disturbed individuals.
A highly publicized custody trial in 1985 only blackened the test’s reputation. The case, which used Rorschach blots as key evidence, deemed mother Rose Martinelli “seriously disturbed” and enabled her husband, Donald Bell, to take on custody of their two children. Soon after, Bell was arrested for molesting his 5-year-old son. The Rorschach inkblots were not a crystal ball, but how could they have gotten it so wrong? When going back through the trial, researchers found that Martinelli’s “disturbed” Rorschach scores were due to a coding error.
A critique called “What’s Wrong With the Rorschach?” followed and featured Rose Martinelli as its key argument against the test.
“The use of Rorschach interpretations in establishing an individual’s legal status and child custody is the single most unethical practice of my colleagues,” one psychologist said. Critics called for the test’s removal and refer to it as “an embarrassing vestige of pseudoscience.”
Today advocates who still believe the test to be a “marvelously sensitive and accurate tool for showing how the mind works” won’t give up. They have retooled the scoring system to make it more rigorous. The Rorschach blots have been paired with new technology, like fMRI scanners, EEG exams and eye trackers, to study the test’s connection with our visual system, empathy and perception.
Yet the test has never recovered from the stain of inefficacy. Once the second-most-popular psych test, now it just cracks the top 10. The test has become “a symbol for everything people didn’t like about psychotherapy, too much unprovable inference, too much room for bias, not enough hard science,” writes Searls.
Symbol or not, they are still admissible in court and continue to be used in custody battles. They are reimbursed by medical insurance companies and administered during job interviews.
In 2017, when everyone is entitled to his or her own perspective and there are no right or wrong answers, it’s easy to see why we have seized on the Rorschach test as a concept that describes anything we imbue with our own subjective meaning.
But the metaphor isn’t accurate. Just ask Rose Martinelli if the Rorschach test has a right or wrong answer. The tests, though much less respected than they once were, can, in some cases, still cost you a job or even custody of your children.
“In other words,” Searls wrote in Time recently, “even the Rorschach test is not a Rorschach test.”
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